The Outermost House (4): A Year of Life on the GreatBeach of Cape Cod. Henry Beston. New York: The Viking Press. 1928 (1956).
Why read it? Like Thoreau at Walden, Beston took up a solitary residence in a cottage on the beach where he could observe the life of the sand and the dunes and the moods of the ocean.
Sample ideas and quotes:
“…a flock of geese flying over the meadows along the rift of dying, golden light, their great wings beating with a slow and solemn beauty, their musical, bell-like cry….” p. 116.
“To understand this great outer beach, to appreciate its atmosphere, its ‘feel,’ one must have a sense of it as the scene of wreck and elemental drama.” p. 123.
“Go about in the cottages, and you may sit in a chair taken from one great wreck and a table taken from another; the cat purring at your feet may be himself a rescued mariner.” p. 123.
“Eighteenth-century pirates, stately British merchantmen of the mid-Victorian years, whaling brigs, Salem East India traders. Gloucester fishermen, and a whole host of forgotten nineteenth-century schooners—all these have strewn this beach with broken spars and dead.” p. 125.
“I woke last night just after two o’clock and found my larger room brimming with April moonlight and so still that I could hear the ticking of my watch.” p. 143.
“An April morning follows, spring walks upon the dunes, but ocean lingers on the edge of winter.” p. 145.
“Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night.” p. 168.
“The beach at night has a voice all its own, a sound in fullest harmony with its spirit and mood—with its little, dry noise of sand forever moving, with its solemn, over-spilling, rhythmic seas, with its eternity of stars that sometimes seem to hang down like lamps from the high heavens—and that sound, the piping of a bird.” p. 175.
“Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.” p. 176.
The Outermost House (3): A Year of Life on the GreatBeach of Cape Cod. Henry Beston. New York: The Viking Press. 1928 (1956).
Why read it? Like Thoreau at Walden, Beston took up a solitary residence in a cottage on the beach where he could observe the life of the sand and the dunes and the moods of the ocean.
Sample ideas and quotes:
“Those trillions of unaccountable lives [insects], crawling, buzzing intense presences which nature created to fulfill some unknown purpose or perhaps simply to satisfy a whim for a certain sound or a moment of exquisite color….” p. 65.
“As I muse here, it occurs to me that we are not sufficiently grateful for the great symphony of natural sound which insects add to the natural scene…all those little fiddles in the grass, all those cricket pipes, those delicate flutes….” p. 65.
“Living in outer nature keeps the senses keen, and living alone stirs in them a certain watchfulness.” p. 81.
“Being struck in the face by this sand and sleet was like being lashed by a tiny, pin-point whip.” p. 87.
“From the moment that I rose in the morning and threw open my door looking toward the sea to the moment when the spurt of a match sounded in the evening quiet of my solitary house, there was always something to do, something to observe, something to record, something to study, something to put aside in the corner of the mind.” p. 92.
“As I walk the beach on a bright and blustery January morning, my first impression is one of space, beauty, and loneliness.” p. 96.
“…no one really knows a bird until he has seen it in flight.” p. 98.
“I pause here to wonder at how little we know of the life span of wild animals.” p. 109.
The Outermost House (2): A Year of Life on the GreatBeach of Cape Cod. Henry Beston. New York: The Viking Press. 1928 (1956).
Why read it? Like Thoreau at Walden, Beston took up a solitary residence in a cottage on the beach where he could observe the life of the sand and the dunes and the moods of the ocean.
Sample ideas and quotes:
“The sea has many voices…hollow boomings…heavy roarings, great watery tumblings and tramplings, long hissing seethes, sharp, rifle shot reports, splashes, whispers, the grinding undertone of stones, and sometimes vocal sounds that might be the half-heard talk of people in the sea.” p. 43.
“The ocean…constantly changing its tempo, its pitch, its accent, and its rhythm, being now loud and thundering, now almost placid, now furious now grave and solemn-slow, now a simple measure, now a rhythm monstrous with a sense of purpose and elemental will.” p. 44.
“Every mood of the wind, every change in the day’s weather, every phase of the tide—all these have subtle sea musics all their own.” p. 44.
“…the surf process must be understood as mingled and continuous, waves hurrying after waves, interrupting waves, washing back on waves, overwhelming waves.” p. 47.
“Away from the beach, the various sounds of the surf melt into one great thundering symphonic roar…an endless, distant elemental cannonade.” p. 47.
“I can watch a fine surf for hours, taking pleasure in all its wild plays and variations.” p. 53.
“We lose a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun….the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live….” p. 59.
“That multiplicity of insect tracks, those fantastic ribbons which grasshoppers, promenading flies, spiders, and beetles printed on the dunes as they went about their hungry and mysterious purposes, have come to an end in this world of winter….” p. 65.
The Outermost House (1): A Year of Life on the GreatBeach of Cape Cod. Henry Beston. New York: The Viking Press. 1928 (1956).
Why read it? Like Thoreau at Walden, Beston took up a solitary residence in a cottage on the beach where he could observe the life of the sand and the dunes and the moods of the ocean.
Sample ideas and quotes:
“Bird migrations, the rising of the winter stars out of the breakers and the east, night and storm, the solitude of a January day, the glisten of dune grass in midsummer….” p. viii.
“Man can either be less than man or more than man, and both are monsters, the last more dread.” p. ix.
“On bright moonlit nights, I can see both the whitewashed tower [of the light house] and the light; on dark nights, I can see only the light itself suspended and secure above the earth.” p. 18.
“Animals are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travails of the earth.” p. 25.
“In a world older and more complete than ours they [animals] move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” p. 25.
“…the solemn unrest of the ocean….” p. 37.
“The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach.” p. 43.
Minority Report: HL Mencken’s Notebooks (10). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1956.
Why read it? One of the most celebrated curmudgeons in American history. Mencken writes in half-truths. He’s half wrong, but he is also half right. His style jolts the reader. He will make you think. The topics are random, from a collection of ideas that had gathered dust over the years but which he had never developed into full-blown essays. Reading these quotes again, I am thinking of the irreverence of the television show, All in the Family. Mencken might be a great Archie Bunker, if Archie Bunker could write.
Sample quotes and ideas:
“The most steadily attractive of all human qualities is competence…good at his trade…understands its technique thoroughly…surmounts its difficulties with ease….” p. 224.
“The one thing common to all prophets is their belief in their own infallibility.” p. 226.
“I know a great many more people than most men, and in wider and more diverse circles, yet my life is essentially one of isolation, and so is that of every other man; we not only have to die alone, we also…have to live alone.” p. 228.
“It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest men.” p. 233.
“The essence of the superior man is that he is free of…envy.” p. 233.
“When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him; all he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.” p. 234.
“The good humor of the American Negro is largely founded on cynicism.” p. 234.
“Culture…is…an atmosphere and a heritage—the Renaissance [for example].” p. 239.
“Moderation in all things: not too much life; it often lasts too long.” p. 239.
“The work of the world, in all departments, is chiefly done by bunglers.” p. 240.
“Very few generals are fit to be trusted with the lives of their troops, very few medical men are expert at diagnosis and treatment, and very few pedagogues really know anything about the things they presume to teach.” p. 240.
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.” p. 247.
“Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.” p. 247.
“It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that that fact proves his existence.” p. 249.
“…religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked and against God.” p. 250.
“Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the business man…who fought to the end against any approach to rational and humane dealing with labor.” p. 250.
“…sense of humor, which is to say, a capacity to discover hidden and surprising relations between apparently disparate things, to penetrate to the hollowness of common assumptions, and to invent novel and arresting turns of speech.” p. 264.
“The psychology of the bore deserves a great deal more sober study than it has got.” p. 266.
“A bore is simply a nonentity who resents his humble lot in life and seeks satisfaction for his wounded ego in forcing himself upon his betters.” p. 267.
Comment: So there you have it—Mencken’s half-truths and accusations against life and institutions. I think Mencken says what a lot of us think. But in reading his ideas, we can see that he is only half right. He usually pegs what is wrong pretty well, but offers no solutions except those that are negative. He is entertaining. He is thought-provoking. But he leaves us with a ton of unsolved problems. I once learned in a course in logic to beware of generalizations. Well, Mencken is the King of Generalizations. RayS.
Minority Report: HL Mencken’s Notebooks (9). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1956.
Why read it? One of the most celebrated curmudgeons in American history. Mencken writes in half-truths. He’s half wrong, but he is also half right. His style jolts the reader. He will make you think. The topics are random, from a collection of ideas that had gathered dust over the years but which he had never developed into full-blown essays. Reading these quotes again, I am thinking of the irreverence of the television show, All in the Family. Mencken might be a great Archie Bunker, if Archie Bunker could write.
Sample quotes and ideas:
“Artists can seldom account for their own work….” p. 188.
“The process of creation is only partly intellectual; the rest of it seems to be based on instinct rather than on idea.” p. 188.
“The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a …slander on the poor….” p. 190.
“Every man is intrinsically anti-social.” p. 191.
On G.K. Chesterton’s method of writing essays: “…four-fifths of his essays start off by citing something that is generally believed and then seeks to demolish it….” p. 194.
“People crave certainties in this world and are hostile to ‘ifs’ and ‘buts.’ ” p. 199.
James I of England, 1621: “I will govern according to the common weal, but not according to the common will.” p. 203.
“The masses of the people are quite as incapable of deciding questions of government as they are of deciding questions of medicine.” p. 202.
“It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world…but idealism.” p. 211.
Abraham Lincoln: “No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.” p. 215.
Government: “The aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey.” p. 217.
“In every 100 of the men composing [the government] there are two who are honest and intelligent, ten obvious scoundrels and 88 poor fish.” p. 221.
“The men who fought for self-determination at Gettysburg were not the Federals but the Confederates.” p. 223.
Minority Report: HL Mencken’s Notebooks (8). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1956.
Why read it? One of the most celebrated curmudgeons in American history. Mencken writes in half-truths. He’s half wrong, but he is also half right. His style jolts the reader. He will make you think. The topics are random, from a collection of ideas that had gathered dust over the years but which he had never developed into full-blown essays. Reading these quotes again, I am thinking of the irreverence of the television show, All in the Family. Mencken might be a great Archie Bunker, if Archie Bunker could write.
Sample quotes and ideas:
“The New Deal not only cost the American tax payer billions and greatly depleted the accumulated resources of the country, it also burdened future generations with a charge that will grow larger and larger as year chases year.” p. 159.
“There is a great need of a history of political corruption in America.” p. 160.
“The essence of science is that it is always wiling to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one.” p. 166.
“The English know how to make the best of things…so-called muddling through is simply skill at dealing with the inevitable.” p. 167.
“The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.” p. 168.
“The only way a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man shall do.” p. 168.
“Is a young man bound to serve his country in war? What is called his country is only the government, and that government consists merely of professional politicians…who never sacrifice themselves for their country…and make all wars, but very few of them ever die in one.” p. 173.
“The thing that makes philosophers respected is not actually their profundity, but simply their obscurity.” p. 178.
“Yesterday the danger that a soldier ran in the field was the danger of a duelist with a sword in hand; today it is much more like the danger of a hog in a slaughter-house.” p. 179.
“Life on this earth is not only without rational significance, but also apparently unintentional.” p. 182.
